I agree, that at least in the 40s and 50s there was a feeling that we were finally getting a handle on all sorts of scientific problems that had been unanswered since the dawn of history. What is a human mind really about? For centuries people have been telling stories about people with unexplainable abilities, how about we really get in there and figure it out?

And so early science fiction is littered with psychic powers, treated seriously as just another sort of super science, like atomic energy and robots and rockets.

And when you look at the social and technological changes that had taken place between, say, 1900 and 1950, it's not surprising that people expected further radical transformations. Like psychology becoming a hard science with equations and stuff.